Case Number 14455

BANGKOK DANGEROUS

The Charge

A dangerous man in a dangerous place.

Opening Statement

I need to go grab some pain reliever. Back in a minute.

Facts of the Case

Kong (Pawalit Mongkolpisit, The Elephant King) may be deaf and dumb,
but he is most assuredly not a guy you want to mess with. Kong is a professional
hitman, and he is very good at his job. He never misses a target, he performs
his tasks with ruthless efficiency. He walks through the seedy underbelly of
Bangkok, which as the title so subtly implies, is dangerous. He could be killed,
but he doesn't seem to care. Kong doesn't care about much of anything...until he
meets a beautiful girl (Premsinee Ratanasopha) who treats him with tenderness
and affection? Does she represent a new beginning, or just the beginning of the
end?

The Evidence

Bangkok Dangerous ought to be more interesting than it is. It was
written and directed by The Pang Brothers (Oxide and Danny), who are probably
best-known at the moment for the 2002 horror flick The Eye. That film was
recently remade as an American film starring Jessica Alba, and now Bangkok
Dangerous is getting the big-budget American remake treatment. Unusually,
the new version is also being directed by The Pang Brothers. I'm quite curious
to see how it stacks up to the original. This is one of those rare cases where a
movie remake actually has a whole lot of potential areas in which it could
greatly improve on the original.

Bangkok Dangerous is nothing if not experimental. I like to think of
it as an experimental nothing. The Pang Brothers pull out every single visual
trick they can possibly think of. We get weird coloring, fuzzy black-and-white
footage, grainy old home video footage, security camera visuals, bizarre camera
angles, odd filters, slow-motion, fast-motion, rewinding, fast-forwarding, SUPER
EXTREME CLOSE-UPS, a lizard, and the kitchen sink. You may imagine that it looks
something like a crazy John Woo flick, or maybe Natural Born Killers. It
should, but it doesn't. Instead, it looks like something you or I crafted on a
home PC (unless you are Mr. Spielberg, in which case I apologize and request
your autograph).

I recognize that this film probably didn't have a big budget, so obviously
The Pang Brothers didn't have the luxury of being able to hire top-drawer tech
guys to help them with their visual doodlings. Still, I've seen plenty of crazy
low-budget movies that look far better and more professional than this one.
Heck, Werner Herzog made Aguirre, The Wrath of God for less than half a
million bucks. Yes, I realize it's mean to ask anyone to be as talented as
Werner Herzog, but you know what I'm saying.

The film quickly moves into a fairly repetitive rhythm. Kong has a flashback
about his terrible childhood (kids throw rocks at him and call him names that he
imagines are quite offensive). Kong uses these memories to help commit some
terribly violent act against another human being. Kong meditates for a while.
Kong visits some sort of dance club and sits in a daze while unbearably noisy
techno music plays. Kong shares a quiet moment with a girl that he kind of
likes. These scenes are repeated over and over, neatly divided with various
dollops of visual leakage.

Bangkok Dangerous is billed as a wild and crazy action movie, but the
hyperactive look of everything may lead you to think there is more action than
there actually is. Pole dancers swinging around to thumping music while the
screen changes colors doesn't count as an action scene (though I suppose it
could easily turn into a different sort of action scene,
wink-wink-nudge-nudge-say-no-more). If the visuals aren't making you soil
yourself quite as much as The Pang Brothers hope, you may actually discover that
Bangkok Dangerous is pretty dull and uneventful. There are way too many
scenes in which nothing at all happens. Don't get me wrong, I love quiet and
introspective movies as much as anyone. I'm a big fan of Bergman and Tarkovsky.
This movie isn't quiet and introspective; just slow and...ahhh...zzzz. When it's
not dull, it's occasionally a bit troublesome. A bizarre rape sequence is
handled in a pretty tasteless manner, as is a scene in which someone shoots a
dead man in the crotch. Don't even get me started on the plot. After a while, it
gets pretty difficult to remember why anyone is doing anything, aside from the
fact that Kong kills people because he was mistreated as a kid.

You know what this movie needs? It needs crappy, incoherent, extremely noisy
English-language narration lathered all over everything. Honestly, as
experimental as the movie is, it wouldn't feel out of place. I would prefer a
maniacal monster truck announcer of some sort. "Hahahaha...witness the
scenes of the dancing Godzilla toy! It...is...blowing...your...mind! Now
starting...gunshot number seventeen! Four men dead! Hahahaha!" I'm grasping
at straws, as you can tell. Really, just about anything would improve this film
a little bit. Oh, except for one thing: Nicolas Cage sporting really bad hair.
Whatever happens, do not let Nicolas Cage anywhere near this material. What's
that? Oh. Well, bugger.

The transfer is pretty crummy. Of course there's a lot of footage that is
intentionally in bad shape (very much in the vein of the recent
Grindhouse), but the stuff that is actually supposed to look good looks
poor. Flesh tones are off, black are not deep at all, and the darker scenes are
typically unpleasant to look it. It's quite difficult to tell what's going on.
Sound is okay, but very uneven. I had to adjust the volume several times due to
fluctuating music volume. Still, I must admit that a couple of interesting
things are done with the audio here. Did you think that sequence in the
nightclub in Babel was a neat idea? Bet they got it here.

Closing Statement

I dislike Bangkok Dangerous. It's a bad movie, but not entertainingly
bad enough to provide camp value. The film seems to think that it's quite
something, and desperately wants to be Hard Boiled, Pulp Fiction,
and The Matrix all rolled into one. It isn't anywhere near one of those
films in terms of quality. It's not the sort of painfully bad film that you wish
you could erase from your mind; it's just a nuisance that kind of gets on your
nerves while you watch it. Ouch! Shoo, get off me. Where's my fly swatter?